Every so often, things fall apart.
In the words of those who lived it, here are the vibes and the semantic signatures of the twentieth century’s most devastating social collapses.
From the meaning in their words, wisdom for our future emerges.
Recent major media stories that feel to us like they’re part of a larger narrative campaign.
Recent major media stories that feel to us like they’re part of a larger narrative campaign.
The cure for the cancer of gun culture and police culture is not to be found in reform laws around guns and police, but in reform ideas around culture, ideas that create a new dimension of American society that rejects LARPing and LARPers alike.
Inflation
What made Bitcoin special is nearly lost, and what remains is a false and constructed Narrative that exists in service to Wall Street and Washington rather than in resistance.
The Bitcoin narrative must be renewed. And that will change everything.
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Crypto
Recent Notes
The NFL Has a Gambling Problem
The outcomes of NFL games are inordinately influenced by officials relative to other sports. This is not new. The narrative environment faced by the NFL in 2021, however, IS new.
I’m not sure they’re ready for it.
The Mandarin Class
I don’t think there’s anything illegal in how Fed governors trade their personal accounts.
No, I think it’s much worse than that.
When Narrative Takes Flight
We find ourselves together now at the stage of the Widening Gyre in which your political identity now determines the reality you wish to accept about three days of moderate operational difficulties at the ninth largest global airline, as measured by passenger-miles.
No Time to Die: China Banks Edition
With $300+ billion of assets, Evergrande is big, but if you want REALLY big, take a look at the balance sheets of Chinese banks.
ET contributor Marc Rubinstein was there at the beginning when Chinese banks went public, and he’s here now to review the sector.
How Lucky You Are To Be Alive Right Now
ET friend and contributor David Salem is back!
Here with his Constitution Day address at Middlebury College, David makes the rich tradition of academic speeches richer still, with nods to the Founders and Vitalik Buterin alike.
The Uncontained Spark
There is an uncontained spark in the financial world today, a spark that emerged from the unlikeliest of places, a federal courthouse in Florida.
It’s a spark with the potential to light a searing bonfire under Robinhood and Citadel.
#BITFD
Zeroism and the Allocator Status Quo
ET contributor Matthew Edwards pushes back on seven rules that allocators often apply to new managers.
1) We don’t do crypto.
2) We only invest in what we know.
3) We never pay full fees.
4) We prefer fundamental investment strategies.
5) We seek strong alignment of interests.
6) We cannot be greater than x% of a fund’s total assets under management.
7) We require a minimum track record of X years.
Unanchored
ET contributor Brent Donnelly starts up where he left off, with a new launch of AM/FX and a new riff on the classic ET note, “Snip!”.
In the immortal words of Hunter S. Thompson, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!
Whitestone Bridge
In 1937, in the midst of a Great Depression, we started building a mighty bridge, not for a war effort, but for a popular movement based on wonder and progress.
We really did that.
Can we do it again?
The Green Protocol: A New Vision for Crypto, Pt 2
The Green Protocol is a set of rules for the tokenization of symbolic betting markets in positive social good.
I think this is how crypto saves the world.
Our first step on this new path? Let’s plant one billion new trees in North America over the next ten years.
Cursed Knowledge #5: Hot Coffee
The McDonalds Hot Coffee lawsuit is the archetypal example of nonsense litigation. But there’s a lot more to the story than most people know.
Notes from Camp Kotok 2021
ET contributor Brent Donnelly with an end-of-summer compilation of the top–of-mind topics at Camp Kotok!
Prophet of the Pandemic
Sophocles knew it. Dostoevsky knew it.
Disruption to the biological order and disruption to the social order are one and the same.
Afghanistan and the Common Knowledge Game
When the State Department announced on August 12th that it was removing all remaining non-essential personnel from Kabul within 3 days and was considering a relocation of the US embassy to the more defensible airport, the fall of the Afghani government became common knowledge.
And that’s when everything fell apart.
The Afghanistan Narratives
We are in the very early innings of the narrative formation around responsibility for the outcome in Afghanistan. Steel yourselves for weeks of gaslighting from every angle. Hooray.
ET Podcast #13 – Wanting
It’s the only question that really matters here in the Age of Nudge: why do we want what we want?
A conversation with Luke Burgis, author of “Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life”.
Cursed Knowledge #4: The Olympics
The Olympic games are known as a time of triumph and glory. The truth is that a lot more work goes into creating and maintaining that narrative than you’d expect.
How a Narrative Goes Viral
It is a fact that migrants here illegally have spread, are spreading, and will spread Covid-19.
It is also a narrative. A dangerous, seductive, rapidly spreading narrative that will cause many of us to shut off our minds to other facts, which is what narratives DO.
How do we parse the two?
Sauron Remains Undefeated
Here’s my take on this weekend’s Senate wrangling over the infrastructure bill, and the implications for crypto.
The US Treasury is the Eye of Sauron — a gigantic panopticon tower that sweeps the world with its unblinking gaze, seeking out the owners of power, i.e. money.
And Sauron remains undefeated.
Nudging State, Noble Lies
In the world of Nudge, everyone is an ad man, and the government is just the biggest, baddest ad man of them all.